Quote:
Originally Posted by Ghost of Econgrad
I asked the questions because I kind of see CAGeonerds point.
Arod74, I was asking why you think the demand is not there for High-Rises. Wburg's answer is the economy (please correct me if I am mis-quoting you Wburg), and population; but I meant: Why did these cities grow so large, what factors caused them to grow? I need to re-phrase I guess:
What are the factors in New York and Chicago, that made those cities large in the first place, and are we missing these factors in Sacramento?
I am sure many will say "Port Cities", but Sac was once and sort of still is a Port City.
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Well, for starters, we're on the wrong side of the country. East Coast cities and Midwest cities had a long head-start on population growth, while California was an economic backwater for a long time. Second is not just the economy but their place in the history of urban growth: cities that grew big in the 19th century did so in a very dense, compact fashion due to the transportation infrastructure of the era.
Third, and perhaps most applicable here, is competition: cities compete with each other for primacy in a region. New York competed with Boston, and won because they had a better harbor and better access to the transportation network (at the time, the rivers and canals.) Chicago competed with St. Louis, and won because they had not only a water connection but multiple rail connections, allowing them to leapfrog St. Louis.
Sacramento had some natural advantages (our location along waterways and our early lead in railroads) but we had immediate disadvantages. Getting to Sacramento's port meant passing up two other ports on the way (San Francisco and Oakland.) Our weather was also a disadvantage: before air conditioning, there wasn't much escape from Sacramento's oppressive summer heat, and it took decades to build a flood control network that could keep floods at bay: until the early 1900s, Sacramento was surrounded on four sides by levees, like the walls of a castle! In the meantime we had a reputation as a stiflingly hot, flood-prone place--while the Bay Area was far more temperate, aside from the occasional shake-up. When people like Stanford, Crocker, Huntington and Gallatin made money in Sacramento, they moved to San Francisco--and built the universities, banks, hotels and opera houses named after them in the Bay Area. We got stuck with their old houses and turned them into orphanages and civic buildings.
Los Angeles started out way behind us, but they leapfrogged us in the 1880s when a second railroad entered the LA Basin, resulting in a massive land boom (in many ways, an economic bubble like our recent one.) Their weather was even better than San Francisco's, and a combination of railroad rate wars and real estate speculation drove their growth very rapidly. The Bay Area also got a second transcontinental railroad connection, which fueled a lot more growth there--the two railroads competed with each other for business.
Meanwhile, Sacramento was strictly a Southern Pacific town until Western Pacific and the electric interurbans arrived by 1910--but by then, the era when a new railroad would trigger a land boom had mostly passed (although that era did trigger the growth of many of our early suburbs!) During that era, we went through a big period of civic questioning, including paying some very smart folks to tell Sacramento how it could grow up.
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